Well, actually Denver usually DOES have higher cancer rates. Attribution, however, is difficult. (It's probably not just altitude.)

Jobs was a completely non-technical stuffed shirt. The only things he brought to the table were his narcissistic self confidence and a sleazy ability to sell other people's work.

And make no mistake, those are valuable skills, if your goal is to get rich rather than to build the best toys. Even under the most charitable possible interpretations, however, it's still a fundamentally parasitic relationship. The "doers" tend to suck at selling ourselves, while the weasels are good at rooting through our scraps and claiming whatever shiny garbage they find as their own.

What do you mean? Denver has frequently been compared with some sea level city, and found to suffer more radiation damage. (The exact radiation damage found depends on the study.) Of course, it's hard to control for the amount of granite, etc. nearby, so they aren't strictly reliable studies, but they *have* been made.

Sorry, that's a bad argument. It may well be true, but any absorbed radiation will raise the temperature, and any raise in the temperature makes unusual chemical reactions more probable. So you need to argue that the factor is too trivial to be significant. This is probably true, but has never been demonstrated, and probably cannot be demonstrated. (I've seen claims that they're demonstrated the harmlessness, but the claims were always logically invalid.)

....are books that they can buy by the meter, for pennies on the dollar, if that much. These are surplus books that publishers - the world's leading destroyers of books - would have to destroy anyway.

Trainers can't afford to buy actually rare, desirable books.

It's a shame that all of this data is locked up on private servers, but that's really more of a problem of the copyright system than anything else. Anyone who scanned these books would be banned from making it public.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".

Is 98 greater than 56? Yes? Okay then. It's still going up. So much vitriol from someone posting nothing but bare assertion - Cite please, beyond your fee-fees?

Let me 'splain it to you in simple language. The number of qubits doesn't need to scale exponentially on the short term for quantum computing to pose a very real threat; it only needs to hit the mid hundreds. As I mentioned, Grover's algorithm is O(n) - Meaning once we hit 256 qubits (plus some change for overhead), SHA256 is substantially weakened. Is that a full crack of AES, which you'll kindly notice I didn't previously claim, Mr. Goalposts? No. No it isn't - But it's arguably worse - SHA is almost ubiquitous and affects far more than encryption itself. You don't need to crack a tank's armor if you can convince its driver to piss in the fuel tank.

I also happen to think - and to be clear, what follows is my opinion, not psychic knowledge about the future - you're completely wrong on the bigger picture; and once QC hits its stride Gordon Moore will again be relevant. But critically, that's not necessary for it to cause some serious damage in the near future.

Considerably. Also wider spread.

Well, IIUC the actual models generally say more "nuclear autumn". It's still enough to cause massive famines and various other really undesirable effects. (I didn't say side-effects, because they are really components of 'nuclear autumn.)

OTOH, that was the prediction decades ago for a nuclear war between India and ... Pakistan or Afghanistan (I don't remember which).

I doubt those methods give the estimates for 10m below the surface of the ocean. It *is* a short record, but it's what we've got. Also, I don't see any reason to doubt it, except that I'd rather the answer were different.

Still, don't put high certainty in this particular measure. The problem is that it agrees (in general) with lots of other measures that have a much longer span. There are arguments against pretty much every one of them, but they aren't convincing and even so you have to have dozens of special cases happening at once.

This is all moot because it's false that if you use AI you cannot gain copyright on the work. I literally hold a copyright registered with the US copyright office (I registered with them, despite not being a US citizen, because they're precedent-setting), fully disclosing the use of AI in the process, and directly speaking about the matter with a copyright examiner.

What the standard is is that raw, unfiltered outputs are not copyrightable (and even then, there's wiggle room; the argument put forward by the copyright office was "based on their current understanding" (as of several years ago) and presumed very minimal control by the user over the outputs (which was actually already obsolete by the time they put it out, but that's nitpicking)). But the human creative action you take with those outputs can cause the resultant product to be copyrightable. This can be things like sample mixing, mastering, adding vocals, etc, but can also even just be the selection process itself. Yes, assemblage, selection, curation, etc are all potentially copyrightable acts.

In my case, while the samples were (overwhelmingly) AI, the whole project was weeks of work, involving hundreds of generations, track splitting and reassembling, things down to the level of editing individual phonemes (or for example in one part, stripping the vocals and instruments from a sample down to just the residual "other" channel, throwing it into reverse, and then piling on progressively more reverb and volume up to a sudden cutoff to create a tension-point transition). No issues whatoever registering the copyright on it. I'm sure you could do far less and still have a copyrightable work.

I think people need to keep in mind that marketability (aka enjoyability), talent, and effort are three independent axes. You can be talented at one or more aspects of music production, a genuine skill (play a guitar, sing, etc), but put forth either high or low effort, and make good or terrible music, all independently. You can put forth a lot of effort, but you may or may not be talented, and it may or may not be good. You may make a great enjoyable marketable track, but may or may not have notable talents, and may or may not have put in a lot of effort.

In general: I judge how much I want to listen to it by its enjoyability; I attribute how much the author deserves credit / how much it's "art" by how much non-rote effort they put in; and I value the artist's skill based on their demonstrable talent. All of this independent of what specific tools were used. That said, knowledge of certain facts may colour one's enjoyability of a track. If you hate AI and know / suspect it's AI, that'll strongly colour your enjoyability of it. Or if you know the artist is a bad person or whatnot, that again can colour your enjoyability of a track that you'd otherwise enjoy in a vacuum.

One thing I've been thinking recently is being in the AI trade but only with high seniority, not common stock. So if there is a "pop", but the underlying business remains sustainable, the high seniority investors end up with the assets and make a mint when the market returns to balance, whereas the stockholders are the ones who suffer. This could mean a mix of convertible bonds / convertible ETFs, preferred shares, senior corporate debt, physical infrastructure (power suppliers, REITs, etc), BDCs and private credit vehicles, etc. Or possibly even common stock in some of the diversified giants (Google, Microsoft, etc), who - while they'd take quite a temporary hit in a crash - would survive and then buy up all the distressed players.

Oh, shoot, I forgot my "Claude-isms" ;)

I mean, Leopold was literally fired from OpenAI after one year.

(Though I would hardly call Altman "a genius". He's a rather sociopathic VC guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time)